Operating rooms are organized such that several patients will be scheduled for an operating room in a given day. Many tasks are necessary for a surgery, and operating room specialists must coordinate their work in order to ensure efficiency and smooth transitions between tasks. Each task requires the allocation of specific resources, and when the tasks are delayed costs may rise (for example if the surgical team is waiting around they are being paid but there is no patient care being provided to offset the costs). Lack of coordination results in errors, misunderstandings between personnel, excess costs, and wastes of time. Therefore, surgical personnel are responsible for implementing a systematic work plan for surgical procedures.
During the course of patient treatment there are several different “steps” in the care provided. Each of these steps corresponds to a different point in the timeline of the surgical procedure, and thus can be identified as the “status” of the patient's treatment. Preliminary preparation of the operating room is done before the patient enters. Cleaning the operating room is part of total patient care and is a cooperative effort involving several personnel members, each with separate duties. The division of duties is quite specific, yet each member must plan the timing of their duties such that both the sterile and nonsterile parts of the operation move along expeditiously.
Definite routines are established for the preparation of an operating room for surgery. To work efficiently during a surgical procedure, personnel must be thoroughly familiar with the established routine in the operating room suite. Once a sequence is established, each surgical team member must be aware of what steps have already been taken to know when they must perform their steps of the sequence. Failure to communicate the status of each surgical routine step causes unnecessary delay and extraneous costs.
The current system for the timely implementation of multiple surgical procedures involves a back-and-forth between different surgical personnel teams. For example, surgery A is to be performed with surgery B following immediately afterwards once the operating room has been cleaned and prepared. Surgeries can last anywhere from minutes to hours, and usually the time for a specific surgery will vary somewhat with each surgeon that performs the surgery, and with each patient on which it is performed. Thus, in order for the surgeon performing surgery B to know when the room is cleared and prepared, the surgeon must continually call a nurse or assistant stationed near the room to check on the status of surgery A. Unfortunately, there is often no one available to answer the phone, or the person giving an update is unaware of a change in the status of the surgical procedure, and available operating rooms go unused while hospital personnel wait around needlessly. This causes unnecessary excess costs in patient care, and diminishes the efficiency of the surgical process.
Systems have been developed for the storing of hospital data and patient medical information; however they do not promote real-time communication of the status of medical procedures. Typical systems consist of hand-written notes taken by the medical personnel during the procedure, which are then entered into a computer system later in the day. Thus, there is a need in the art for a system of intra-hospital communication that would deliver real-time status updates. Specifically, there is a need for a system that is able to inform hospital personnel what steps are in process during a medical procedure, particularly in a room that requires sterility, so as to efficiently schedule subsequent hospital procedures. It is to these ends that the present invention has been developed.